F E A T U R E
POWERING
THE NEXT WAVE OF AI INFRASTRUCTURE GROWTH IN THE UK & IRELAND
With AI-focused workloads driving power demands, data centres across the UK and Ireland are facing increasing constraints on power availability. Matthew Baynes, Vice President, Secure Power and Data Centres, UK and Ireland at Schneider Electric, highlights that resilient UPS systems and intelligent power distribution solutions are becoming critical to enabling sustainable growth in the evolving energy landscape. s AI demand soars,
A so does the pressure on its infrastructure. Today, businesses and governments are seeking growth zones to scale AI’ s evolution and the UK and Ireland are becoming the strategic choice. Yet without power, there is no compute and without compute, there is no AI. High density AI clusters are driving record demand for capacity, resilience and efficiency – pressuring power grids, extending connection queues and tightening net zero commitments. In this context, uninterruptible power supplies( UPS) and power distribution can no longer be considered as a back room engineering detail, but key strategic enablers of the future AI economy.
Escalating power density is at the heart of the AI scaling challenge. According to McKinsey, traditional racks averaging
8kW are rapidly being replaced by AI workloads consuming over 80kW, with roadmaps targeting 120kW and beyond. The electrical and thermal stress this places on the upstream infrastructure is significant, meaning it is no longer enough to think only in terms of total megawatts to site. Operators must now design power trains that can deliver very high and dynamic loads to specific clusters while maintaining overall resilience. At the same time, the cost
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